Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America by J. L. Anderson (review)

"No where in the world can such marvelous herds of swine be found as in the corn states of America," wrote one British observer in 1880. "Here the pig is monarch of all he surveys" (22). As J.L. Anderson reveals in this wide-ranging history of pigs and pork in America, hogs were just about everywhere (and ate just about everything) in America over the last four centuries.

Like the pigs that forage and root throughout this history, Andersons's book breaks new ground. Most chapters effectively consolidate and build upon previous porcine histories, while adding new insights and details to make what is probably the most comprehensive history of American pork and pigs ever written. Capitalist Pigs is a valuable addition to animal, agricultural, and food history.

Anderson begins with a zoomed-out "gehography" (12) of Sus scrofa domesticus in North America over the past 400 years. Building on histories by William Cronon and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, J.L. Anderson details the ways in which pigs disrupted native ecologies and agriculture and were sometimes the first line of European expansion. Among domesticated animals, pigs were highly adaptive to new and diverse environments and were independent, omnivorous, and quick to reproduce. But ranging pigs also caused countless conflicts—between colonists and natives, but also among groups of colonists, who made numerous laws to manage hogs.

Though hogs spread across North America, the spatial range of individual hogs in fact shrank over time. This becomes an implicit irony and a theme of the book: As the large-scale geography of pigs spread, their range as individuals shrank—from free range, to confined pastures, and eventually to "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFOs). Anderson tells this story with nuance across several chapters. These changes sometimes emerged as a result of laws (including efforts to control freed blacks after the Civil War by regulating their pigs). At other times the changes came from scientific and profit-driven agricultural practices, enabled as they were by policies and laws.

But pigs were more than just pork. In what is perhaps the most fascinating chapter, Anderson explores markets for non-food uses of pigs in the nineteenth century. Pigs provided humans valuable sources of fat and oil (Anderson does not discuss leather). One report noted that of 245,000 pigs slaughtered in Cincinnati in the first five months of 1843, 80,000 were killed "for the express purpose of conversion to lard" (123). Anderson discusses the ways in which pork lard became "a major American commodity" (122), though the scale of trade and production is never precisely delineated. In particular, pig fat could be refined into oil for machines and lighting. There were pigs in candles and oil lamps, pigs in sewing machines and steam engines, and pigs in soap. With rising demand for pig fat, the bodies of animals changed, with Berkshire and China hogs becoming preferred stock for their thick layers of fat. In the nineteenth century, swine became known familiarly as "land whales," "prairie whales," and "Ohio whales" (123). Low-cost hog production in the United States in turn created cheap pig products that were dumped on world markets in ways that created trade disputes and tensions in the late 1800s.

In several chapters, Anderson explores micro and macro foodways and consumption patterns across the United States. Anderson notes that pork became an affordable, non-perishable food that was popular among workers—particularly those living or travelling far afield, like sailors and lumberjacks. Americans ate lots of pork, but pork never reached the apex of what Anderson calls the "meat hierarchy" in America (consumers preferred beef in the nineteenth century and chicken in the twentieth). But for working class Americans of all kinds, "hog meat was an ideal food" (82).

Although pork lard had been the most popular cooking fat throughout the nineteenth century, new dietary advice beginning in the 1970s pushed Americans to avoid animal fats. In response, pig...